← prasan · the work
houses, stages & cities
Four chapters of the same job, in full: five residential hacker houses, a three-month launchpad, a two-day flagship, and the city debriefs in between. The numbers are all here — take the chapter you came for.
hacker houses
Two-week residential cohorts, not 48-hour sprints. Thirty builders a house, twenty devs, ten designers, curated hard, living together, shipping daily.
The first house
Protocol infrastructure and core tooling. BetterIDEa, 0rbit and LiteSeed all trace back to this one room, all three now used globally.
view post ↗Dev-tools cohort
Developer experience, tools for builders. ARlink demos one-click permaweb deploys here and closed a $2.5M seed after.
view post ↗Testing what AO could do
A tighter four-day format built to stress-test AO while it was still being built and where the Touchgrass ritual started.
view post ↗Mainnet apps
The first applications built for AO mainnet, with direct consultations from Sam Williams and investors, then presented live at Arweave Day India.
view post ↗Champions Summit
Forty builders, taken global. A mature-phase cohort focused on consumer-facing applications, the house format, exported out of India.
the feed ↗Stealth House
Thirteen days, thirteen builders, ten projects. The smallest, longest and quietest room we ran and pound for pound the most productive.
watch ↗From Hackathons to Hacker Houses: change necessary for projects to take off.
A residential cohort and the three months of follow-through after it.
Curation
600+ applications → 30 builders.
The house
Residency program where they can focus on building, free from socio-economic boundaries.
Launchpad
The longterm planning where projects turn into products.
Demo Day
3 months All in on products. From features to first users to roundtables with investors.
Residential beats sprint two weeks of co-living, not 48 hours of caffeine. And follow-through is infrastructure: the seed closed three months after demo day. That gap is the product.
hacker house 2024 · cohort 3. the hand goes up before the question's finished.
the launchpad
Three months of follow-through after demo day, where the houses actually pay off.
The Launchpad, where the houses actually pay off
Houses and Launchpad were never two programmes. They were one funnel: the strongest teams out of every house carried straight into three months of structured follow-through.
Best of the houses
No open call. The teams that shipped hardest in the residency got the seat.
Structured follow-up
Weekly check-ins, intros, debriefs — the unglamorous part nobody runs.
Products, not demos
Projects harden into things people use. ARlink is the loudest example.
Follow-on funding
The round closes months after the applause — because someone stayed in it.
The houses and the Launchpad exist to move people along one path: curious builder → confident founder launched, incubated, funded or acquired, and recognised outside India. Most ecosystems run a hackathon and call it a pipeline. The Launchpad existed because demo day is the halfway point, not the finish line and the funnel only works if the same people who curated the room are still there ninety days later.
Fundraised
The outcome the whole programme is measured against.
Core infrastructure
Shipped out of the first house, now used globally.
20+ active projects
The long tail that keeps an ecosystem alive between flagships.
conference
Two-day flagships built end-to-end: the run of show, the keynotes, the softbox, and the seats.
Arweave Day India “The permaweb is here”
The flagship. Sam Williams keynote, a full main-stage program, and a room that finally felt like an ecosystem.
Main program
Keynotes, panels, live demos, one tight run of show.
Sam Williams
Founder headline that set the tone for the day.
Production
Softbox, stage lights, seating, AV, all handled.
100+ sessions
Speaker sessions across the year, on stages worldwide.
Two-day flagship
The recap thread, keynote, crowd, and the after.
view post ↗All Hands-On.
India's first web3 vibe code Hackathon: mini hackathon on Day 1 ADI.
watch ↗100+ speaker sessions
Talks, panels and keynotes across global stages.
the feed ↗Off the roadmap
Always up for side quests that brings something new out of people and allows them to discover the magic hidden for them through the events I curate.
Had a great time doing production for Free Fire India Qualifications in April'26
meetups & debriefs
The between-the-flagships work: laptop-open debriefs across cities that keep the momentum warm.
Multi-city debriefs
Country-wide city tours — 4,000+ builders reached.
view post ↗Ahmedabad Buildstation
A city meetup, filmed: the room, the questions, the after.
watch ↗The Winston Awards
Yearly community awards: culture, kept on purpose.
view post ↗
Nobody remembers the slides. They remember the hack.
A debrief that's only a talk is a webinar with worse coffee. So every city stop hid a small team hack, 45 minutes, random pairs, one silly team project and the room stops being an audience.
off the clock
Hours when the laptops close. Sport, hikes and actual sunlight, because the best debugging session is a football match with the cohort.
Touchgrass day zero laptops
A full day out with the cohort trails, games, real conversations. The bonds that ship product form here, not in Slack.
Sport & sunlight
Football, frisbee, table-tennis the recurring ritual that resets a burnt-out house and keeps a community human.
building a room worth being in?
Hiring for an ecosystem, events or community role, or want a residency that actually matters? Let's talk.